The latest independent data from Thinkbroadband has revealed that the footprint of Openreach’s (BT) national Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) network, which currently offers broadband speeds of up to 1.8Gbps to ISPs and their customers, has just passed the 50% of UK premises (16,328,469 ready for service) milestone.
Openreach are currently investing up to £15bn to expand the coverage of their new full fibre network to reach 25 million UK premises by December 2026 (here), which includes around 6.2 million premises in rural or semi-rural areas. On top of that, they’ve also expressed an ambition to reach up to 30 million by 2030, although this will partly depend upon a favourable outcome from Ofcom’s next Telecoms Access Review 2026 (TAR).
The new research highlights that the latest figure of 16.32m is up from 12.34m premises exactly one year ago (2023), as well as 8.98m in 2022 and 5.89m in 2021. In term’s of the country-by-country breakdown, this means that Openreach’s full fibre network currently reaches around 49.04% of premises in England (this includes c.300k from KCOM), 63.38% in Wales, 46.73% in Scotland and a whopping 88.99% of Northern Ireland.
However, Openreach’s official figure is likely to be much closer to 17 million premises (RFS) than this, which is down to the laborious process of checking that Thinkbroadband needs to do in order to ensure the accuracy of its data (i.e. they’re often a month or so behind the operator’s latest build).
The new service, once live, can be ordered via various ISPs, such as BT, Sky Broadband, TalkTalk, Vodafone and many more (Openreach FTTP ISP Choices) – it is not currently an automatic upgrade, although some ISPs (e.g. TalkTalk) have started to do free automatic upgrades as older copper-based services and lines are slowly withdrawn.